XBMC Media Center is a multimedia control panel that you can use to seamlessly play video clips and audio tracks, as well as view pictures, while fully enjoying this experience. It can be easily handled, even by less experienced users. The interface of the application is slick and intuitive. Unfortunately, there is no option to exit full screen mode. In the main menu, you can navigate through videos, music, pictures, weather and programs.

So, you can view the current temperature and weather forecast for the following three days. Plus, you can have up till three locations set up. When it comes to images, you can select the viewing mode between image wrap, list, big list, thumbnails and pic thumbs. But you can also change the sorting order (e.g. by name, type) and create a slideshow.

Video clips can be organized in a playlist. Plus, you can load subtitles and configure settings regarding deinterlacing, video scaling method, black bars cropping, viewing mode, zoom amount, pixel ratio and post-processing, among others. XBMC Media Center is fully customizable from the “Settings” area. It even allows you to observe some information about your system, such as memory usage. Thus, you can adjust the program so that it provides stability and a good performance.

Some New Features in version 13.0:
- Update to FFMPEG v1.2 which we use for audio/video playback
- Stereo audio can now be up-mixed to 5.1 and sent through optical/SPDIF devices
- Various visual changes throughout the skin which should improve usability and logic
- Improve the handling of subtitle downloading and selection
- Extend and improve the User-interface Engine which developers use to create a variety of skins to be used
- Drop of support for Windows XP. Due to upgrades in the way we build XBMC, it is no longer possible to install or run XBMC on Windows XP. For current XP users we can suggest installing OpenELEC or XBMCbuntu as a free way to use XBMC 13 as a pure media centre
- When initiating a library cleaning, XBMC will send a wake-on-lan request to any sleeping servers first, before cleaning the library, to ensure that content isn’t unnecessarily cleaned
- Numerous PVR fixes and updates with additional new features updated on a per-platform basis. For more info, check out our PVR wiki page
- Copy/paste support on Windows, OSX, and iOS to match copy/paste support elsewhere
- Movie sets are now user editable
- Episodic bookmarks – If episodes are not broken into individual parts (e.g. Friends episode 1 and 2 are in the same video file), a bookmark can be set that will cause launching episode 2 from the UI to go directly to the bookmark in the video file